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3 Critical Questions For Leading Change

Posted by on October 31, 2016

I want to tell you a simple story that illustrates what every leader must do to lead their team or entire organization through the change process. You are the leader of a team that has been involved in an outward bound teambuilding session for two weeks.

Your team is out in the open and you are eating your lunch on the ground. The weather conditions are changing and you are monitoring the situation on weather radio.

In first scenario, you as team leader say to your team in a stern voice get up and follow me right now. A few people respond but the majority stay in place. Now you raise your voice and yell I said come with me.

The second scenario you say as the leader we are going to move. Here is the plan, we are going to stand up together at the same time and form a single file column and make sure no one runs or gets left behind. The group is very hesitant to get up and it takes time to get everyone in a line and progress is slow.

The third scenario is you say to the team there is a tornado less than five minutes from here, follow me to that brick building and we will all be safe. Everyone moves and no one is hurt.

In the first situation the leader tried to use positional power which almost never works anymore, especially with the next generation workforce. The second scene was a perfect example of trying to manage the change process instead of leading. The major reason most change initiatives fail is they are over managed and under led.

The bottom line for me is this based on our simple little story. Leaders always need to answer three questions when they want an individual or an entire organization to change. What is the Problem? How are we going to Solve it? Why is this important to You?

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Finding Real Success In Life

Posted by on October 28, 2016

We owe a great deal to several authors who have written excellent books on how to move from success as the primary goal in your life to real significance. Probably the book Half Time by Bob Buford has made the most life changing impact with people who have worked very hard to be professionally successful in the corporate world only to find their personal life lacked real purpose and meaning.

Significance moves way beyond profits as a definition of success to people and how is my life adding value to others. Success many times is simply about what do we get at the end of the day, while significance is about what are we willing to give away to make a difference.

If you want to have an eternal impact on the people who are a part of your life you must move beyond significance to surrender. When you live a total life of surrender your definition of success is totally determined by the One you are following. This definition alone will give you true significance as He uses your life story to impact other people in ways that will permanently change them for their good.

This means that we must die to the world’s definitions of success as the accumulation of power, position and pleasure and conform our expectations to His perfect will for our lives. This may include the ability to make a lot of money and have great positions of leadership responsibility.

A surrendered life is one that is lived in total partnership, so that He can use us as He sees best to change the world one person at a time starting with us. There can be no greater definition of success and significance in this life.

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Five Irrefutable Paradoxes Of Leadership

Posted by on October 26, 2016

I grew up in a culture where positional power meant more to your leadership success than the content of your character. Your education and resume were far more important than relationships. Finally, the research shows that character is more important than competency. However, this Forbes posts points out there are still some very important paradoxes to understand:

“When we picture someone who is a leader, we tend to imagine a certain kind of person. Certainly, the so-called “Type-A” personality is high on the list — someone who might be called a perfectionist or hard-charging. We imagine someone who is supremely confident in their own abilities, makes decisions quickly and works fast; someone who occasionally seems arrogant in their self-confidence and who consistently succeeds in whatever they try to do.”

3 Critical Personnel Qualifications

Posted by on October 24, 2016

When hiring any new employee you can ultimately place all of the criteria you are evaluating into the two major categories of character and competency. In the old days of the Industrial Age model of hiring the priority was given to job competency over personal character.

The process was started with a specific job description and then you would try to find a person with an educational and experience background that matched that job assignment. Their character was a factor but just not the main one.

In the new Information Age character has now clearly moved to the top of the list. Today you find the right person that will be a good fit for your team and over time you know they will find their right seat on the bus.

Jack Welch had three major things he was looking for at General Electric with all new executives. Two of these criteria related to character and only one to competency.

The first test was integrity because he wanted to know they would keep their word and tell the truth.

The second test was for intelligence because it takes smart people to compete in today’s complex global economy.

The third test was for personal maturity which means they can handle the stress and setbacks with equal parts of joy and humility.

The major reason for this significant shift in hiring priorities is that people now have to know how to work well in a highly participative environment. In this culture the mutual goals of the group are the target and not just personal success.

Everyone must have the mindset that what matters is that we succeed regardless of who gets the credit. Competency will always play a part in the hiring decision but today personal character clearly separates the winners from the losers.

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Developing Intentional Relationships With Non-Christians

Posted by on October 22, 2016

For years we have all been told that we are to be witnesses for Christ so that people can come to know Him. The major problem is that the prevailing strategy that has been used for years has never worked for the overwhelming majority of Christians.

The problem is not that this command is somehow out of date to the point that it should no longer be taken seriously. The critical failure is how we as leaders have modeled this ministry and trained our people to carry out this most important assignment for the church.

In the worst of situations we have trained our people to memorize a lot of facts and then after meeting a total stranger try to share all of the facts with them so they can make the most important decision of their lives all in thirty minutes.

I will acknowledge that in some cases there are divine appointments that God has prepared someone’s heart for just such a meeting. However, that does not mean that we should take this aggressive an approach with everyone we meet.

In the normal course of everyday we all tell stories about things that have happened in our lives. The subject matter can be anything from our last vacation, great new restaurants, job stress and personal family problems.

The reason why all of this works so easily is that it is in the normal course of our everyday lives within relationships that already exist to some degree. This is the biblical model of as you are going about your life share with other people the incredible and wonderful things that He has done in your life.

When evangelism moves from direct confrontation to casual conversations more people are going to respond to the good news of the gospel.

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Glocal Missions Strategy

Posted by on October 21, 2016

During the last century there were very clear distinctions between the concept of evangelism and missions. In the simplest of terms evangelism was reaching people for the local church and missions was reaching people for the kingdom.

Within the context of missions there was a local, national and an international segmentation. This implied the potential for several different strategies to be effective in all of these areas. It was understood that to reach people in an international context that significant cultural barriers had to be addressed for the gospel to be effective.

Today the cultural distance between the people who are in the church in America and the people who are not is significant enough to require a cross cultural missiological approach to reach them. They hold an entirely different world view and they are simply not going to come to our buildings regardless of how cutting edge our marketing may be.

For churches to be effective today in reaching the unchurched in America we are going to have to become missionaries in our own local context. We will have to find ways to take the gospel to where the people live, work and play and do it in a culturally relevant way.

That is why we need to stop thinking in terms of the old models of segmentation. The world has literally moved to America and through the use of technology and the new global economy everything has changed.

The church must become glocal in its thinking, which means one missiological mindset that produces multiple strategies depending upon who we are trying to reach in our area.

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4 Simple Ways To Manage Your Inbox

Posted by on October 21, 2016

Everyone knows that getting the important things done each and every day and walking away from everything else is the secret to success. We all have to process tremendous amounts of information all the time and there are so many things we simply cannot fit into an already loaded schedule.

Sometimes we take relatively simple concepts and make them too complicated. This is my conviction about the subject of personal productivity. When something hits my “inbox”, regardless of its source: email, cell phone, mail, interruptions, there are only four possible things I am going to do.

DELETE—If it is not important, I immediately kill it as fast as possible.

DELAY—If if is not urgent that it be done now, I file it for later.

DELEGATE—If it is something someone else can do as well or better than I can, they own it.

DO—If the first three options do not work, then it has to fit into my daily plan.

I will admit this is a very simple process with the exception of one phrase: IS IT IMPORTANT?

Technology and productivity may increase your efficiency but they cannot tell you if what you are doing should be done at all. Only your character and core values personally and professionally can do that.

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Short Term Thinking Leads Long Term Failure

Posted by on October 19, 2016

In sharp contrast to the breakthrough impact of the companies that practiced the flywheel effect all of the organizations that could not transition from Good to Great were caught in The Doom Loop. Instead of the consistent daily movement of the flywheel they went for the big impact event that would give the immediate impression of progress only later to regress into failure.

They were not willing to use the deliberate process of figuring out what needed to be done and then simply doing it. “The comparison companies frequently launched new programs-often with great fanfare and hoopla aimed at motivating the troops-only to see the programs fail to produce sustained results.”

They wanted the big event or the grand program or the new celebrity CEO that would allow them to skip the daily discipline of the flywheel and move immediately to breakthrough. The repeated pattern of this cycle consistently produced disappointing results and then reaction without understanding starts the loop all over again.

Peter Drucker commented on these companies, “The drive for mergers and acquisitions comes less from sound reasoning and more from the fact that doing deals is a much more exciting way to spend your day than doing actual work.”

The Doom Loop is a classic example of an organization continuing to do the same wrong things over and over again and yet somehow expecting different results. At the core of this problem is a leadership team that is more concerned with short term personal success than what is best for the long term benefit of everyone involved?

In the end this is not a strategy problem but a character one.

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The 5 Elements Of A Strong Leadership Pipeline

Posted by on October 17, 2016

The greatest waste of leadership capacity for any organization is the underutilization and lack of development of key people within their own company. The key reason in my mind is that these executives are overvaluing delivering results at the expense of not developing the next generation of leaders. This HBR post drives this issue to the top of the list:

“It’s not that development itself isn’t important. In a Deloitte study of 7,000 organizations this year, 89% of executives rated “strengthening the leadership pipeline” an urgent issue. That’s up from 86% last year, and the trend makes sense. Organizations are continuously promoting people into management, and those new leaders struggle with the transition.”

Critical Qualifications For Effective Leaders

Posted by on October 14, 2016

In my opinion the best organizational leadership book that has been written is Good to Great by Jim Collins. It proves beyond any doubt some things we have always know about effective leadership but he discovers some key principles that fly in the face of everything we have been taught in the past.

One thing that is really not new but clearly prioritized in his book is the importance of character in the life of any leader. Character ensures that the motives of the leader are always focused on what is best for the people they are leading and not for themselves.

The most significant myth that this book destroys about great leaders is that they all must be very outgoing cheerleader type personalities and that they have to lead with an authoritarian dictatorial style to be effective.

According to Collins, “Level 5 leaders display a compelling modesty, are self-effacing and understated. In contrast, two thirds of the comparison companies had leaders with gargantuan personal egos that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company.”

This personality type should never be mistaken for laid back soft leaders who don’t have the strength to make the hard calls. As a matter of fact they combine humility with an incredible strong will to make sure the right things are getting done. If they have to they would fire their mother if that is what was necessary for the long term benefit of the organization.

They also give credit to others when things are going well and when they are not they assume personal responsibility. This combination of personal humility and professional will make for the type of leader anyone would want to follow.

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